Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo went down during a powered test flight, scattering debris over the Mojave Desert, 95 miles (150 km) north of Los Angeles. I enjoyed every minute, didn't feel the sixteen hours at all.Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson said on Saturday he was determined to find out what caused a passenger spaceship being developed by his space tourism company to crash during a test flight in California, killing one pilot and injuring the other.īranson arrived in California's Mojave Desert to meet his Virgin Galactic team and federal officials who were opening their investigation into Friday's accident, the second in less than a week involving a commercial space company. ![]() Only Richard Branson earns the occasional eye roll. Wonderful people, lyrical, edge-of-your-seat writing. I dinged him a star, however, because I absolutely had to listen to this at x1.25 it was far too slow going at regular speed. But he gets into the grittier parts, breathes life into the parts where words are brushstrokes on a glorious stellar canvas. Rob Shapiro does well nonfiction is hard. And the writing is superb: some writing reads like straight adventure, and some reads like poetry. You're right there, thinking and living with the people. Personalities are addressed, hopes, emotions. And all along the way were failures, which I found to be inspiring because people learned from them. It follows the creation of a renewed drive to see space entered and goes along to the actual people who strove to make it happen. This is kind of like "Rocket Boys" meets "The Right Stuff". Did Life really make me that distracted? What fun, then, to take this ride now, with all of the players, big dreamers, small dreamers, all oh so devoted. So I'm confounded that everything that happens in "How to Make a Spaceship" happened outside my awareness. I remember being itty bitty, waking up, wearing PJs, to watch all sorts of fantastical rocket launches. In the end, as Diamandis dreamed, the result wasn't just a victory for one team it was the foundation for a new industry and a new age. It is driven by outsized characters - Burt Rutan, Richard Branson, John Carmack, Paul Allen - and obsessive pursuits. The story of the bullet-shaped SpaceShipOne and the other teams in the hunt is an extraordinary tale of making the impossible possible. Why, Diamandis thought, couldn't the same be done for space flight? The flight made Lindbergh the most famous man on earth and galvanized the airline industry. He discovered that Charles Lindbergh made his transatlantic flight to win a $25,000 prize. Undaunted, Diamandis found inspiration in an unlikely place: the golden age of aviation. ![]() In the 1990s this idea was the stuff of science fiction. If the government wouldn't send him to space, he would create a private space-flight industry himself. When he realized NASA was winding down manned space flight, Diamandis set out on one of the great entrepreneurial adventure stories of our time. But from the age of eight, when he watched Apollo 11 land on the moon, his singular goal was to get to space. Peter Diamandis was the son of hardworking immigrants who wanted their science prodigy to make the family proud and become a doctor. The spectacle defied reason, the result of a competition dreamed up by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, whose vision for a new race to space required small teams to do what only the world's largest governments had done before. If he did, he would make history as the world's first commercial astronaut. He had 80 seconds to exceed the speed of sound and begin the climb to a target no civilian pilot had ever reached. ![]() The historic race that reawakened the promise of manned spaceflight.Īlone in a Spartan black cockpit, test pilot Mike Melvill rocketed toward space.
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